Economic Principalshttp://www.economicprincipals.com
a weekly column about economics and politics, formerly of The Boston Globe, independent since 2002Sun, 12 Aug 2018 20:59:33 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.8It’s Not Just Carbon Dioxidehttp://www.economicprincipals.com/issues/2018.08.12/2141.html
http://www.economicprincipals.com/issues/2018.08.12/2141.html#respondSun, 12 Aug 2018 20:59:33 +0000http://www.economicprincipals.com/?p=2141A consensus seems to be emerging that climate change has begun exceeding its natural variability, and that accelerating global warming is something to be feared. What makes me think so? Accounts of widely-shared experiences on the front pages of the newspapers that I read: forest fires; melting ice; famine, flood, and drought; ecosystem collapse and species loss. The Economist’s cover ten days ago was, “Losing the War against Climate Change.” What can we hope to do about it? It’s hard to tell, since, at least for the present, it seems only one problem among many: trade wars, international rivalries, urban-rural…

]]>A consensus seems to be emerging that climate change has begun exceeding its natural variability, and that accelerating global warming is something to be feared. What makes me think so? Accounts of widely-shared experiences on the front pages of the newspapers that I read: forest fires; melting ice; famine, flood, and drought; ecosystem collapse and species loss. The Economist’s cover ten days ago was, “Losing the War against Climate Change.”

What can we hope to do about it? It’s hard to tell, since, at least for the present, it seems only one problem among many: trade wars, international rivalries, urban-rural disparities, even arguments about the nature of truth.Yet many ways of narrowing differences exist, beginning with, as noted, the great but sometimes dangerous teacher of experience.

I’d like to suggest that we pay special attention to another mechanism. I think someone, not me, should carefully examine and compare the coverage that climate change receives from the three major American newspapers, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, with other nations and other languages soon to follow.

There is, obviously, a wide divergence in treatments of these issues. For example, the Sunday magazine of the Times last week devoted an entire issue to a 30,000- word article accompanied by striking photographs of various disasters, titled “Thirty years ago, we could have saved the planet.” Meanwhile, the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, arguing that Trump administration deregulation policies were “improving consumer choice and reducing cost from health care to appliances,” celebrated the decision to freeze corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards as “Trump’s Car Freedom Act.” The two issues are not tightly connected, the editorial argued, offering a crash course in the microeconomics of auto-emissions regulation in a dozen paragraphs.

The Times magazine was especially striking. Nathaniel Rich, the author, writes, “That we came so close, as a civilization, to breaking our suicide pact with fossil fuels can be credited to the efforts of a handful of people, a hyperkinetic lobbyist and a guileless atmospheric physicist, who at great personal cost, tried to warn humanity of what was coming.”

Of the story’s heroes, the lobbyist, Rafe Pomerance, seemingly had been born to his role: “He was a Morgenthau – the great-grandson of Henry Sr., Woodrow Wilson’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire; great-nephew of Henry Jr., Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Treasury Secretary; second cousin to Robert, district attorney for Manhattan,” The physicist, James Hansen, had been the first to raise the alarm, as lead author of a Science paper, in 1982, then, forcefully, before a Senate hearing in the heatwave summer of 1988. Rich’s story has its villains, too: White House chief of staff John Sununu and Office of Management and Budget director Richard Darman, who together blunted a drive to cap carbon emissions during the George H. W. Bush administration. And of course there is the author himself; the son of former Times columnist Frank Rich and HarperCollins executive editor Gail Winston. I don’t know about the three novels Rich has published, but a previous article in the Times Magazine, about the history of a Dupont Co. product called PFOA, for perfluorooctanoic acid, was awfully good. This new article is divided into two chapters, with all the years since 1989 compressed into a short epilogue. My hunch is that they are drawn from a book in progress.

Rich’s article elicited a response from WSJ columnist Holman Jenkins, Jr., “Fuel Mileage Rules Are No Help to the Climate.” Incorporating the arguments of the paper’s editorial more or less by reference (he probably wrote it), Jenkins disparaged Rich’s attachment to international climate treaties that “by their nature would have been collusion in empty gestures.” He scolded him for failing to note that “the US has gone through umpteen budget and tax debates without a carbon tax — which is unpopular with the public, but so are all taxes – ever being part of the discussion.”

That seemed to be jumping the gun, given that Rich’s magazine article so clearly seemed part of a longer account. Perhaps later Rich will get around to the issue of quotas vs. prices as a way of limiting carbon dioxide emissions. Still, I was glad to see Jenkins bring up what seems to me to be the central issue of what can be done to curb global warming. He blamed “the green movement” for “hysterical exaggeration and vilifying critics” for the failure to obtain widespread support “the one policy that is nearly universally endorsed by economists, that could be a model of cost-effective self-help to other countries, that could be enacted in a revenue-neutral way that would actually have been pro-growth” (as opposed to a presumed drag on it). t

I’m not so sure that the Greens, or even the Democrats, are mostly to blame. It’s true that the WSJ has periodically published op-ed pieces propounding carbon taxation – for instance, here. But if the paper’s editorial board has taken the initiative in arguing that global warming is a serious threat and that urgent measures are required to combat it, I haven’t noticed. Jenkins wrote, “A carbon tax remains a red cape to many conservatives, but in fact, it would represent a relatively innocuous adjustment to the tax code. It could solve political problems for conservatives (who want a tax code friendlier to work, savings, and investment) an as well as for liberals (who want action on climate change.)”

I was among those who were disappointed when the Times a year ago discontinued the position of its public editor. To that point it had been the leader among newspapers employing news professionals to plump for high standards of public discussion. Other papers rely on columnists (like Jenkins) to augment debate. and preserve a semblance of even-handedness. Newspaper discourse is a little like an ongoing series of judicial proceedings. Acting as advocates – reporters, for readers; editorialists, for publishers – obey different rules to summon experts to support their pleadings. A seminal event in the saga of global climate study occurred sixty years ago when the US established a carbon dioxide observatory atop a volcano in Hawaii in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Who will establish an equally disinterested project to monitor major emissions of newspaper hot air — the Times magazine piece, the WSJ editorial page — on the topic of global warming?

]]>http://www.economicprincipals.com/issues/2018.08.12/2141.html/feed0They Want What We’ve Gothttp://www.economicprincipals.com/issues/2018.08.05/2139.html
http://www.economicprincipals.com/issues/2018.08.05/2139.html#respondSun, 05 Aug 2018 18:45:26 +0000http://www.economicprincipals.com/?p=2139I live in Somerville, a city near Boston that is rapidly gentrifying. It seems like a pretty good place to think about the implications of Common Ownership Self-Assessed Tax, or COST system, that Eric Posner and Glen Weyl sketch out in Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society (Princeton, 2018) The example they give is Rio de Janeiro, but their notion of “perpetual auctioning” easier to imagine think in a place close to home. Here’s the “thought experiment” the authors propose. Suppose the entire city of Rio is perpetually up for auction. Imagine that every building, business,…

]]>I live in Somerville, a city near Boston that is rapidly gentrifying. It seems like a pretty good place to think about the implications of Common Ownership Self-Assessed Tax, or COST system, that Eric Posner and Glen Weyl sketch out in Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society (Princeton, 2018) The example they give is Rio de Janeiro, but their notion of “perpetual auctioning” easier to imagine think in a place close to home.

Here’s the “thought experiment” the authors propose.

Suppose the entire city of Rio is perpetually up for auction. Imagine that every building, business, factory, and patch of hillside has a going price, and anyone who bids a price higher than a going price for an entity would take possession of it… [Assume] that the auctions are conducted via smartphone apps that automatically bid based on default settings , eliminating most of the need for people to constantly calculate how much to offer. Laws ensure that obvious sorts of disruptions don’t occur (for example coming home to find your apartment is no longer yours). Incentives are in place to care for and develop assets, and ensure that privacy and other values are also preserved. All the revenue generated by this auction would be returned to citizens equally, as a “social dividend,” or used to fund public projects, which is how revenues from oil sales in Alaska and Norway are used.”

What would happen? The slums on Rio’s picturesque hillsides would soon disappear. Whoever bought them wouldn’t be planning to build rickety slums (though what the acquirers might have in mind isn’t described). Where would the slum-dwellers go? Transformed by those “social dividends” into a vast middle class,” they would rent apartments in the skyscrapers that would replace the ritzy shops and condos that now dominate in the center of the city. The rich, meaning “people who own a lot of businesses and land,” would disappear, because “if everything was up for auction, no person would own such assets.” Instead “their benefits would flow equally to all.” And with the radical diminution of inequality that would ensue from steeply progressive taxation, crime would drop, gated communities would disappear, street life would be restored, and trust in public life would flourish.

Not, I think, in Somerville.

In the pure, thought-experiment form of the COST scheme, everything would be owned in common and the right to rent it would be forever on the auction block – a little like the old Soviet Union, but with individuals rather than planners making and timing decisions. In practice, the authors say, some combination would probably be required, as in the United States, where government owns vast tracts of land which it rents out as parcels for drilling, timbering, grazing, and so on, while private property law governs all of the rest.

This isn’t the world of John Lanchester’s biting 2012 novel of contemporary London, Capital, with its increasingly sinister declarations slipped under neighborhood homeowners’ doors: “We want what you’ve got.” It’s much worse than that. In a city like Somerville, individuals and businesses would be required to list their homes and factories on a city website and, for each, enter a price for which they would be willing to leave – or accept a default based on the history of the house. This is a reservation price in the lingo of auctions; it is the “self-assessed” value of the property, in Posner and Weyl’s scheme. It also sets the owner’s annual tax bill – the portion that the city would keep from the sale, at whatever the tax rate happened to be. Residents could adjust their reservation price up or down at any time during the year.

Meanwhile, would-be buyers would search online for houses they might like to acquire, much as they do now with websites like Zillow, with one critical difference: every house would be for sale at the listed price. You could buy it out from under the owner with a few clicks and move in after a “reasonable period of time.” A footnote explains that the authors have in mind mainly a system of business taxation. They describe their example of Rio as “fanciful,” and say that they conjure markets for personal possessions like homes and automobiles mainly to make their account “vivid.”

Weyl works for Microsoft and teaches at Yale University. Posner, son of former US Appeals Court Judge Richard Posner, is a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. Their book contains several other novel proposals, each of which probably merits a column. If I understand it correctly, the essence of their property scheme, is a highly generalized second-price auction, coupled with the steep progressive taxation. They dedicate their book to economist William Vickrey (1914-1996), who identified the mechanism and described its virtues in a celebrated paper, “Counter-speculation, Auctions, and Competitive Sealed Tenders,” published in 1961. In a second-price auction, the winner pays only the second-highest price bid. The idea is to elicit honest offers, to prevent participants from shading their bids. He suggested using the method to auction off government bonds. But houses out from under their owners? “Most novel concepts initially seem far-fetched,” the authors write. “[B]ear in mind [Vickrey’s] idea is already used to assign the advertising slots of Web and Facebook pages all of us visit every day. Every few seconds these slots are reallocated to the highest bidder…”

In 1996, three days after he was recognized, with James Mirrlees, with a Nobel prize in economics for his work on moral hazard in public finance, Vickrey died, preventing him, the authors say, from articulating a grand vision such as their own. (See the splendid biographical memoir by Jacques Drèze.) Instead, they cite a similar scheme propounded by University of Chicago economist Arnold Harberger in a speech in Chile in 1962. He had in mind a way of circumventing widespread bribery of tax assessors by homeowners eager to understate the value of their property:

If taxes are to be levied… on the value of… properties… it is important that assessment procedures be adopted which estimate the true economic value. The economist’s answer … is simple and essentially fool-proof: allow each… owner… to declare the value of his own property, make the declared values… public, and require that the owner sell his property to any bidder … willing to pay… the declared value. This system is simple, self-enforcing, allows no scope for corruption, and creates incentives, in addition to those already present in the market, for each property to be put to that use in which it has the highest economic productivity.

As Tim Harford slyly observed in the Financial Times, “This system [of Radical Markets] has enormous potential — simple, fair, progressive taxes and a more dynamic economy. It would be much easier to develop new infrastructure, build new homes, buy your neighbor’s garden, and pour concrete all over twee villages to build monorails or airport runways.”

Posner and Weyl locate resistance to their idea of using perpetual auctions to erode private property “barriers to trade” in, among other impediments, the “endowment affect.”

The way it works now is that Somerville gentrifies at its own rate. People wait to sell their homes until, for one reason or another, they are willing to let go. Rents are rising rapidly, driven by home sales. A record 871 new units are under construction. Property rights in the city are not absolute, of course. There are zoning and building-code restrictions. A one percent sales tax has been submitted to the state legislature for approval, given that homeowners reap windfall gains thanks to local improvements (better schools, new rail lines) and changes in tastes (more people moving in from the suburbs). That’s about as far as it goes. Meanwhile, Posner and Weyl want most of the rest of our property rights. Shoot the moon!

]]>http://www.economicprincipals.com/issues/2018.08.05/2139.html/feed0The Fog of Trumphttp://www.economicprincipals.com/issues/2018.07.30/2137.html
http://www.economicprincipals.com/issues/2018.07.30/2137.html#respondMon, 30 Jul 2018 13:10:06 +0000http://www.economicprincipals.com/?p=2137Regulators in Berlin plan to block the Chinese acquisition of a German company under a tough new “critical infrastructure” law, according to the business magazine Wirtschaftswoche. The sale of Leifeld Metal Spinning, a Mittelstand machine tool manufacturer with customers in the aerospace and nuclear industries, would be the first transaction prevented under a measure passed after a Chinese appliance maker bought Germany’s largest maker of industrial robots, in 2016. The Financial Times picked up the news EP has no way of knowing, but the guess here is that at least the timing of the decision was a consequence of the…

]]>Regulators in Berlin plan to block the Chinese acquisition of a German company under a tough new “critical infrastructure” law, according to the business magazine Wirtschaftswoche. The sale of Leifeld Metal Spinning, a Mittelstand machine tool manufacturer with customers in the aerospace and nuclear industries, would be the first transaction prevented under a measure passed after a Chinese appliance maker bought Germany’s largest maker of industrial robots, in 2016. The Financial Times picked up the news

EP has no way of knowing, but the guess here is that at least the timing of the decision was a consequence of the truce declared last week in Donald Trump’s trade war with the European Union.

From its start, broad bipartisan support in Washington for strong protectionist measures has been understood to be grounded in anxiety about China’s technological progress. Trump’s chief strategist is US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, a long-time critic of Chinese industrial policy. Xi Jinping’s “Made in China 2025” plan has touched off alarms in European capitals as well.

The issue has been obscured by President Donald Trump’s unilateral decision to launch a two-front war, lashing out at European, Canadian and Japanese allies with steel and aluminum tariffs, and threatening new taxes on imported cars.

Like any global conflict, Trump’s trade blitzkrieg has been difficult to follow. I read four daily newspapers, and I gain much from each of them. I share The New York Times’s indignation at virtually every aspect of the Trump administration, so I enjoy their full-throated denunciations of the president and his team. On the other hand, I expect political divisions to continue after Trump leaves office, so I appreciate the level-headed mix of stories and their play in the first section of The Wall Street Journal (the editorial pages mostly get my dander up). Most cunning in moving the broad story forward has been The Washington Post, even before adding two leading reporters to its staff, Devlin Barrett, formerly of the WSJ, and John Hudson, of Buzzfeed.

But on the topic of trade, the Financial Times beats the others hands down. It’s not just world trade editor Shawn Donnan, whose dispatches are regularly a day or two ahead of the rest. Here is his recent “Big Read” piece, part of an ongoing FT series about the competition between the US and China over artificial intelligence. (The WSJ’s Greg Ip has a slightly different angle.) The FT’s columnists – Martin Wolf, Edward Luce, Philip Stephens, John Thornhill – are more closely attuned to trade policy as well.

The US trade war with China is missing a widely-recognized casus belli. The Soviet Union’s success in launching its Sputnik satellite, in 1957, beating the US into space, sparked a vigorous response. The creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency were established within a year. In Education and Military Rivalry, Philippe Aghion and Torsten Persson studied expansions of mass education that tracked military threats in Europe in the nineteenth century and in a much larger sample of countries in the years after World War II. The National Defense Education Act of 1958 created thousands of PhDs in emerging fields.

Yet neither Trump nor the Republican-led Congress is proposing any such galvanic responses to Xi’s “Made in China 2025” program. Instead, the president has begun a trade war that so far has succeeded mainly in threatening to put big agriculture on the dole. The Republicans have passed a tax bill exacerbating already deep divisions between the states. Meanwhile Trump is waging a campaign not so much anti-intellectual as anti-fact. It keeps crowds coming to his rallies, but it is disastrous way to confront an external threat. Instead, try the careful review of the last twenty-five years of China policy byWSJ veteran Bob Davis for a start.

This much is coming clear. The fog of war is bad enough. The fog of Trump is worse.

]]>http://www.economicprincipals.com/issues/2018.07.30/2137.html/feed0The Two Putinshttp://www.economicprincipals.com/issues/2018.07.22/2135.html
http://www.economicprincipals.com/issues/2018.07.22/2135.html#respondSun, 22 Jul 2018 20:59:33 +0000http://www.economicprincipals.com/?p=2135As shocking as anything that Donald Trump said in Helsinki last week was Vladimir Putin’s emphatic claim that “the Russian state has never interfered, and is not going to interfere, into internal American affairs, including election processes.” Just as there are two NATOs, there are two Vladimir Putins. When US policy didn’t change during his first eight years in office, Putin changed his own. Gradually he became an antagonist – and a demonstrable liar. Much of what I know about the Russian president I owe to Steven Lee Myer’s biography, The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin…

]]>As shocking as anything that Donald Trump said in Helsinki last week was Vladimir Putin’s emphatic claim that “the Russian state has never interfered, and is not going to interfere, into internal American affairs, including election processes.”

Just as there are two NATOs, there are two Vladimir Putins. When US policy didn’t change during his first eight years in office, Putin changed his own. Gradually he became an antagonist – and a demonstrable liar.

Much of what I know about the Russian president I owe to Steven Lee Myer’s biography, The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin (Knopf, 2015), which, despite its tendentious title, is a first-rate book. During seven years in Moscow for The New York Times, Myers lost all sympathy with his subject, and, by the end of the book, regards him as a little more than a megalomaniac, returning to the presidency in 2012 “with no clear purpose other than the exercise of power for its own sake.” That much, I think, is pretty clearly mistaken. But the bulk of Myers’s sensitive and extensive reporting permits the reader to reach a conclusion independent of the author.

As an officer in the KGB in the 1980s, watching the Soviet Union begin to fall apart, Putin learned much about the virtues of credibility. He was, for instance, unusually candid in the campaign manifesto, “Russia at the Turn of the Millennium,” that he published on the eve of replacing Boris Yeltsin at the end of 1999. Russia’s economy had shrunk by half in the 1990s, he wrote; it was a tenth the size of the United States, then a fifth the size of China. Fifteen years of robust growth would be required just to reach the level of Spain or Portugal.

For the first time in the past two hundred [or] three hundred years, [Russia] is facing the real threat of slipping down into the second, and possibly even third rank of world states. We are running out of time to avoid this.

Putin took office as a conciliator, eager for economic integration with the West. He was the first to offer assistance to the Bush administration after 9/11. He did not object to a US base in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan to support the invasion of Afghanistan. He journeyed to Texas to visit George W. Bush at his Crawford ranch.

A series of disappointments followed. NATO continued a second round of expansion, admitting seven nations, including Lithuania, Latvia and Eastonia, former republics of the Soviet Union. Putin flew to Germany and France to join them in their opposition to the invasion of Iraq, without success. The US quietly supported the Orange and Rose Revolutions – westernizing movements in Ukraine and Georgia, and bruited those nations eventual entry into NATO.

Perhaps the most decisive development came when Chechen hostage-taking left 400 dead in the north Caucasus city of Beslan in September 2004. Afterwards, Putin blamed the US for failing to work closely with Russia in cracking down on Chechen rebels. All were terrorists in Moscow’s eyes; in Washington’s opinion, some were moderates with legitimate aspirations to independence.

Putin spoke out strongly in February 2007 in a speech to a security conference audience that included several American grandees. The New World Order with “one master, one sovereign,” was increasing tensions, not diminishing them. “Unilateral and frequently illegitimate actions” were causing more deaths than the bi-polar world that had existed before 1989, he said.

The next developments are familiar. A short war with Georgia in 2008 designed to emphasize its Finlandization in Moscow’s eyes. President Obama’s appointment of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. The Arab Spring and NATO’s intervention to remove the Qaddafi regime in Libya. The beginnings of civil war in Syria. Putin’s decision to replace Dimitri Medvedev as president after the latter served a single term. Clinton’s support of election protests, and, above all, the events in Ukraine in 2014 that led to Russia’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula.

Even then, Putin relied on the reputation he had built for candor, starting with “Russia at the Turn of the Millennium.” The emotionally-charged speech to both houses of the Russian parliament announcing the annexation of the Crimean peninsula was analyzed and annotated by the BBC. It stands up well as an act of persuasion to those who grant Moscow’s right to a Monroe Doctrine of its own. Even the pretense of the “little green men” who stage-managed the referendum by which Russia obtained the consent of the locals seems to fall within the penumbra of truth-telling. Nations aren’t expected to disclose orders of battle when going to war.

It was the downing of a Dutch airliner by missile in eastern Ukraine that marked Putin’s departure from Western standards of credibility. The Russian government denied any role in the in incident, in which 298 persons perished, but investigators concluded that only a senior Russian military commander could have ordered the sophisticated anti-aircraft system deployed to Ukraine.

It was the same thing again last week when Putin denied that the Kremlin had sponsored a massive campaign of digital theft and political tinkering with US social media in 2016. The Washington Postreported yesterday that Clemson University researchers had discovered that Russian operatives had spun out 18,000 tweets, at the rate of a dozen a minute, on the eve of Wikileaks’ first disclosures of emails stolen from Clinton’s campaign manager.

It’s not that Russian interference changed the election. If any last-minute gambit was decisive, it was the incipient mutiny in the FBI’s New York office, for which former US attorney and New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani served as the mouthpiece. It’s that the Russian invasion of digital discourse was a flagrant violation of previous norms. Presumably it arose from exasperation; undoubtedly it made matters worse. But there is no reason to think that it changed the result of the election. The fact remains that Trunp won, 304 to 227 votes in the Electoral College. There will be another election in little more than two years.

Apparently Trump hoped to return home from Helsinki with a written Russian promise that the government wouldn’t encourage or even allow such trespassing again, starting with the mid-term elections. “There was the idea that if Trump brought home such a guarantee, he would be seen as having scored a victory,” an unnamed Russian lawmaker told Demetri Sevastopulo and Kathrin Hille of the Financial Times. “But the proposed text amounted to an admission of guilt.”

Twenty-seven years after the end of the Soviet Union, Russia and the United States are once again foes. This time the valences are reversed. The US is the expansionist power. It is Russia promulgating a doctrine of containment. Both nations are led by men who cannot be taken at their word. US overreaching is not likely to continue indefinitely, any more than did Soviet behavior the last time around. But this much is already clear. Putin is a major figure in the history of his country. Trump is slowly being disowned by his.

]]>http://www.economicprincipals.com/issues/2018.07.22/2135.html/feed0The Two NATOshttp://www.economicprincipals.com/issues/2018.07.15/2134.html
http://www.economicprincipals.com/issues/2018.07.15/2134.html#respondSun, 15 Jul 2018 14:00:13 +0000http://www.economicprincipals.com/?p=2134“Disastrous,” was how the Financial Times yesterday described Donald Trump’s visit to Europe. Were you to extend Trump’s influence indefinitely into the future, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the bedrock of US foreign policy for the past seventy years, would be finished. If, on the other hand, Trump is repudiated in 2020 – my guess is that he will be – the future of NATO depends on what happens in the Congressional elections of 2018 and 2020, and the presidential elections of 2020 and 2024. That means the discussion of NATO can go forward, at least tentatively, pretty much without…

]]>“Disastrous,” was how the Financial Times yesterday described Donald Trump’s visit to Europe. Were you to extend Trump’s influence indefinitely into the future, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the bedrock of US foreign policy for the past seventy years, would be finished.

If, on the other hand, Trump is repudiated in 2020 – my guess is that he will be – the future of NATO depends on what happens in the Congressional elections of 2018 and 2020, and the presidential elections of 2020 and 2024.

That means the discussion of NATO can go forward, at least tentatively, pretty much without reference to Trump’s boorish behavior in Belgium and Britain last week. That future has relatively little to do with whether member nations will spend more of their gross domestic product on defense.

There are, in fact, two NATOs. The first was cobbled together in a hurry in 1948 in response to a Soviet-sponsored coup in Czechoslovakia and the blockade of Berlin. The second emerged, starting in 1992, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The first was shepherded into existence by Harry Truman. The second was created by Bill Clinton.

When the Berlin Wall was dismantled in 1989, the reunification of Germany, a key US foreign policy objective in the years since the end of World War II, was suddenly within reach. First, however, the question of the possibility of a unified Germany’s status within NATO had to be resolved. In exchange for assurances by the administration of George H. W. Bush that NATO would stop there, “would not move an inch” farther east, Russian leaders assented and the armed forces of the former Soviet satellite switched sides.

President Bill Clinton didn’t feel bound by any such promise.. Clinton had visited the Soviet Union in 1970 as a graduate student and had formed his own ideas. He named as Deputy Secretary of State his roommate from those days, former Time Magazine Moscow correspondent Strobe Talbott, and quietly prepared to offer membership to Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, which by then were actively seeking it.

As Clinton’s intention became more widely known, senior figures in his administration, including Secretary of Defense Les Aspin and his deputy William Perry, warned privately of a “train wreck” if NATO enlargement proceeded. Foreign policy intellectuals of both parties, led by Cold War strategist George Kennan, and including Senate Armed Services Committee head Sam Nunn, arms control negotiator Paul Nitze, and Senator Bill Bradley, went public with their opposition in 1996, on the eve of the formal vote.

Clinton and Talbott were undeterred. After the re-election of Russian president Boris Yeltsin, planning began to offer NATO membership to seven more former Soviet satellites: the Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, plus Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia (now separated from the Czech Republic), Macedonia and Slovenia.

George W. Bush replaced Clinton in 2001 and, after 9/11, proceeded with the expansion that the Clinton team had planned, while also invading Afghanistan and Iraq. After the Bush administration quietly supported the “color revolutions” in Georgia and Ukraine, and, the Russians believed, withheld key information about separatist terrorist activity out of sympathy with Chechen independence aims, Russian president Vladimir Putin protested strongly against American’s “unipolar” ambitions in a speech to an international security meeting in Munich in 2007. The next year, Russia briefly went to war against Georgia to make his point.

The Obama administration carried on with NATO enlargement after 2009, overseeing the admission of Croatia and Albania that the Bush administration had planned, adding Montenegro to the list, and bruiting the possibility of membership for Georgia and Ukraine. In 2012 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton criticized Putin’s reelection to a third term as president, enraging him. In 2013, her successor, John Kerry, supported a second “color revolution” in Ukraine. Those events then led in March 2014 to the Russian occupation of Crimea.

This second version of NATO is often lumped together with the first. Enough time has passed that veterans of the Cold War are aged; the policy-makers who would have succeeded them had George H. W. Bush been re-elected in 1992 have been mostly on the sidelines for twenty-five years. Architects of the second NATO dominate the mainstream news. Thus talk show host Rachel Maddow last week introduced Victoria Nuland as “one of the most experienced American diplomats walking the earth.”

In fact Nuland began her governmental career by as Strobe Talbott’s State Department chief of staff for several years. She became Vice President Dick Cheney’s advisor in the Iraq war, served for four years as NATO ambassador, before becoming State Department spokesperson for Hillary Clinton and, eventually, Assistant Secretary for Europeans and Eurasian Affairs. It was Nuland who, while passing out cookies to demonstrators in Kiev’s Maidan Square, was taped by Russian operatives declaiming to the American ambassador “F- the EU[’s]” wishes with respect to the resolution of the crisis. Today she is chief executive of the Center for a New American Security.

Will Trump figure in the future of this narrative? Not much, as long as he isn’t re-elected to a second term. With respect to the future of NATO, there is no alternative to waiting to see how his presidency turns out – and re-examining the history of US-Russia relations while we do. Sonorous stories about the Berlin blockade, the Cuban missile crisis, and the peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union are no substitute for well-informed debate about the second NATO.